


i see fire (inside the mountain)

by eviscerates



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Snowpiercer (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Character Study, Deaf Character, Exposition, Gen, Implied/Referenced Cannibalism, unbeta'd we die like men
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-21
Updated: 2017-03-21
Packaged: 2018-10-08 22:16:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10397397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eviscerates/pseuds/eviscerates
Summary: Adults told Grey he was too young to remember the fire, but he does. His first memory is of fire.Searing heat, and scorching flames, and the sound of crackling wood, people screaming. Later, when he’s old enough to be told, Gilliam tells him half the Seam burnt, killing his mother and his father and so many others. It was just a small fire in someone’s hearth, but unattended, it burnt out of control.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't written anything in a LONG time (thanks depression) but recently found this old fic from 2014 (!!) and I thought I'd clean it up and post it. 
> 
>  
> 
> This is kind of a strange crossover, I know, especially since Snowpiercer is such an obscure fandom, but it's still one of my personal favorite crossovers to this day because it just *works* - The people from the tail section fit so well as common people of the districts with the people from the front end being the richer folks. 
> 
>  
> 
> My personal opinion on why Grey never speaks is that he's deaf - mute, and that is in play here. Unbeta'd, mistakes are on me.

Adults told Grey he was too young to remember the fire, but he does. His first memory is of fire.

 

Searing heat, and scorching flames, and the sound of crackling wood, people screaming. Later, when he’s old enough to be told, Gilliam tells him half the Seam burnt, killing his mother and his father and so many others. It was just a small fire in someone’s hearth, but unattended, it burnt out of control. That was the thing about fire, Giliam said, it was unpredictable, moreso than anything else.

 

Gilliam is old, and even as a child Grey thinks he is too old to work in the mines. But the government says he has to, and they need to eat, and Grey is too young for tessarae - Not that he would ever let him sign up for any. He goes to his neighbor Tanya’s house, where she washes clothes and looks after children while their parents are in the mines for whatever the parents can afford to pay. Tanya is nice, and kind to him, but he cannot understand what she says most of the time. It’s like she’s speaking to him through water and his ears are stuffed full of cloth and he has to learn his words from the shape of her lips. It gets easier, after that.

 

When he is four, there is an explosion.

 

He doesn’t hear it, but he feels it, the vibrations in the earth and the soundwaves nearly knocking him down. His teeth rattle and it feels like something in his chest is going to burst loose, and the other children are crying with their hands over their ears, but still he hasn’t heard anything.

 

It takes Tanya hours to calm them all down, and by that time, Andrew from next door has come over with an expression on his face that looks wrong. Tanya tells all the kids to go play, but Grey hides. In the ceiling he can see Andrew perfectly, can see his mouth shape the words _mine, collapse, demolitions, wrong, trapped_.

 

He almost isn’t shocked when Tanya tells him that Gilliam is one of the people trapped in the mine, and Grey wonders if it’s quiet beneath the earth. He cries, though he doesn’t make any sound. Tanya holds him and tells him he can stay at her house and that they’ll get him out, but her face looks wrong when she says it.

 

A little over a week later, the rescuers break through the rocks. Gilliam is alive, and Grey runs to him when he comes home and clings to his legs and cries. There is a boy Grey has never seen before, with blue eyes that scare him to look at, that comes out with Gilliam. No one else makes it out alive, and everyone wonders how they survived.

 

Everyone says it is a miracle Gilliam didn’t die when he had to amputate his own injured arm, thank God he had medical experience. Gilliam tells the story to those who ask, but Grey thinks his face looks wrong when he tells it.

 

The boy - Curtis, Gilliam tells him - Shows up almost every day to help Gilliam around the house. He builds him a cane, he builds him a better prosthetic leg for the one he lost to blood poisoning years ago, he builds him a wheeled chair to get around in. He didn’t talk to Grey, he barely talked to Gilliam.

 

These are all memories Grey remembers only secondhand, as if he is remembering a story told to him by a stranger when he was half asleep - But he remembered the boy’s eyes, so startlingly blue like a sky after a thunderstorm, and there was something behind him that made little Grey avoid him.

 

A year later, the boy is Reaped and he wins.

 

Grey is too young to understand anything that goes on, but he remembers the horror on Gilliam’s face when he watched the screen, how he told Grey to go practice his letters and whatever you do, don’t look at the TV.

 

He is ten before he realizes what Curtis did to survive in the Games. What he had to do to keep from dying from starvation. It does not repel him, and he is not horrified like the others his age are. Grey understands survival, understands that the means to an end aren’t always pretty, even so young. He decides not to hold it against him if he ever comes back to his and Gilliam’s house.

 

The people of his own district whisper and call him a monster, mothers tell their children to stay away from him, kids dare each other to ding-dong-ditch his house in the Victor’s Village.

 

Grey watches Curtis sometimes. All the other houses in the Victor’s Village are empty, and easy to slip in a window or break a basement door latch. He sits in upstairs windows, watching Curtis in that huge house of his. Usually, he sits in the living room and drinks out of an oddly shaped brown bottle or isn’t in his house at all. Once he sees him kick over the table, throw the bottle against the wall, and scream. He can’t hear the scream, but he puts his hand against the cold window glass and imagines he can feel it.

 

Gilliam insists he go to school, but Grey doesn’t want to. He wants to stay home and take care of him, do whatever work he can find around the Seam and sometimes some in the Merchant neighborhoods, and not listen to overly-cheerful teachers tell him about the glory of President Wilford. 

 

The teachers don’t know what to do with him because he is smart, too smart for their tests and questions and has already skipped two grades at age twelve. The kids don’t like him because he is quiet, they make fun of him for his hearing and how he doesn’t talk and they think he can’t understand them but he does, because they don’t understand he can hear them. Their voices sound like angry, droning bees, and he wants to hit them, but Gilliam is teaching him about the importance of picking his battles, so he doesn’t.

 

He can’t remember whose idea it was to give him the tattoos - His, or Gilliam’s. He is barely twelve when he writes to Gilliam that he knows how expensive paper is, and he doesn’t want him to have to keep buying him any. The ink in his skin is a compromise.

 

It happens in the Hob, in a dimly lit stall ran by a thin hollow-eyed man with an ancient tattoo gun, a relic from before the Dark Days. He hands him a list of what words he wants, and where, and grits his teeth when needle meets skin. Gilliam does not offer his hand to hold, because he knows Grey and knows Grey wouldn’t ask for it. Grey adjusts to the pain, and his eyes close, and four hours later he is a walking canvas of things yet unsaid.

 

The kids at school bother him for the tattoos, they call him things he doesn’t remember and throw pencils and erasers at him while he tries to concentrate on the mundane work he is assigned. Walking home from school one day, he is bothered by a boy from the merchant district, who is all fair angel hair and pale unmarked skin and round wrists that never had to go days without food. He throws a rock and says something when Grey’s back is turned, yells at him to turn around and face him like a man. Grey keeps walking. Gilliam has told him how to pick his battles, and this boy is not worth it.

 

But the boy runs after him, and pushes him down, and laughs.

 

Grey is up before the boy registers he has even moved. The heel of his hand flies into the boy’s nose - He keeps his thumb outside his fist so he won’t dislocate his finger, and his knee rams into the boy’s solar plexus hard enough that the boy coughs hard enough to bring up a little blood. The boy is angry and his punch is uncoordinated, and Grey catches his fist in midair.

 

He twists his arm hard enough behind his back to hear the bone _snap_.

 

He leaves him on the street, and walks home. He writes to Gilliam that he doesn’t want to go to school anymore. He lets him quit. He knows there is nothing that they can teach Grey that will help in the kind of life he is going to lead in the Seam. He spends his days helping the older people in the Seam, fixing things - He is good with his hands and is much cheaper than a workman from the merchant district. He is popular with the kids, because he lets them ride on his shoulders and they are fascinated by the words on his skin. When he repairs Tanya’s roof after a heavy snowfall, she tells him he is a good boy and gives him extra bread, even though he knows she doesn’t have any to spare.

 

He gets more tattoos, some just because he likes them. He reads old books of Gilliam’s and finds words he would never have any excuse to use, _effervescent, denouement, labyrinthine, phantasmic._ He gives the man with the tattoo gun moonshine he bought off the old woman outside the Hob and he inks the beautiful, useless words onto his body. He will never need to point to them, but they make him feel better for being there. Gilliam does not allow him to sign up for tessarae. They have a small garden, with tomatoes and herbs and a chicken to lay eggs and an outside spigot for water. They are more privileged than most in the Seam because Gilliam remembers how to do things like garden and care for grass, but there are more times than Grey cares to count that they have gone hungry.

 

A drought that kills their plants, the chicken hasn’t laid eggs, there was no money for bread. Grey is no stranger to hunger, or to thirst. Gilliam once joked the both of them would survive the Hunger Games simply by starving everyone out. Grey had frowned, his knuckles tightening and the alphabet on his skin stretching.

 

He never found jokes about the Games funny. Nothing about the Games was funny.

 

When he is fifteen, with his name in the Reaping only four times, he is picked.

 

He hears his name, clearly. He hears the intake of breath of Gilliam beside him, he sees the girl from the Merchant district that was Reaped before him look at him with a mixture of bewilderment and sympathy at his Seam coloring, his ripped clothing, his tattooed skin, his hair.

 

He sees Curtis, the only living Victor from Twelve, look up.

 

Their eyes meet.

 

The thunderstorm-blue still holds that something that used to scare baby Grey, only now he knows what it is. Neither of them look away, and Grey sees something else in his eyes, beyond the pain and the years of dead tributes Curtis must have had to go through - Hope.


End file.
